School Governance

US hate group targets WA school

Written by CompliSpace | Mar 27, 2014 1:00:00 PM
A Western Australian high school has come under attack from the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church group in the US for staging a play about the murder of a gay student.
 
WA Today reported the group has made several offensive Tweets about the school's staging of the play, The Laramie Project.
 
In a statement posted on the WA Department of Education website, Margaret River Senior High School principal Andrew Host said: “The play will go on with no changes.”

“I think it is clear that any reasonable, thinking person would reject those extreme views,” Mr Host said.

The play is in the WA syllabus for drama.

In 1998, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed the funeral of student that the Laramie Project is about.

The group, which advocates the death penalty for gay people, gained its notoriety in the US when it started to picket the funerals of US soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The group has argued the soldiers were killed as punishment from God for fighting for an "evil nation for abandoning all moral imperatives" by supporting gay people.